For Alabama Republican, an Unlikely Role Looms

A conservative Southerner nominated to the federal bench is rejected by the august Senate Judiciary Committee after what amounts to a civil trial on charges of racism.

Stunned and searching for vindication, the man gives up the law for politics and ultimately wins the seat of the home-state senator who played an integral part in killing his judicial nomination.

In Washington, the lawmaker joins the very committee that disdained him and slowly rises to the top, where he becomes a leading voice in deciding the membership of the United States Supreme Court.

Such is the abridged version of the fall and rise of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, newly picked by his Republican colleagues to serve as their chief advocate in the confirmation hearings for President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Sessions is in some ways perfectly suited to be a central figure in the looming spectacle since his own 1986 confirmation battle extending over several months and a series of difficult hearings was a precursor to the brutal judicial brawls to come.

“It was a very unpleasant moment,” recounted Mr. Sessions, who was a 38-year-old United States attorney when President Ronald Reagan first nominated him for a federal judgeship in Alabama late in 1985.

Mr. Sessions admits he was completely unprepared for the buzz saw he encountered in the Senate, where district court nominees typically do not get the intense scrutiny reserved for appellate court judges and those on the high court.

But liberal activists and Democrats on the Judiciary Committee — notably Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio — led a charge against Mr. Sessions and produced witnesses who described incidents and statements that cast the nominee as racially insensitive.

Though Mr. Sessions disputed many of the incidents and dismissed others as what would now be called politically incorrect jokes, Mr. Sessions did not back off his criticism of the Voting Rights Act, which had helped southern blacks overcome obstacles to voting.

Central to the complaints of his critics was his prosecution of three civil rights activists on voter fraud charges arising from the 1984 elections in Alabama. They were acquitted, and his foes saw the charges as petty and politically motivated, evidence of the prosecutor’s own bias.

The confirmation was taking place in a charged political environment. Democrats were unhappy that President Reagan had been able to put scores of conservatives on the federal courts and were determined to slow that parade. And Senate Democrats were entering the 1986 mid-term elections in a strong position, aware they could retake the Senate and play a much stronger hand in deciding judicial nominations for the final two years of Mr. Reagan’s term.

One of three senators facing re-election that year was Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who was coming under pressure to oppose Mr. Sessions. Of course, that is the same Arlen Specter whose recent defection to the Democratic Party cleared the way for Mr. Sessions to assume the senior Republican slot on the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Specter, who ended up opposing the nomination, told reporters a few days ago that he regretted his stance against Mr. Sessions.

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But the vote that was fatal to Mr. Sessions at the time was that of Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, the Democrat who formerly headed the his state’s Supreme Court and was known universally as Judge Heflin. Mr. Heflin said the hearings left him with “reasonable doubts” about how Mr. Sessions would perform as a judge and his view provided ample cover for any opposition. The nomination died in committee.

Mr. Sessions returned to Alabama, where he was elected state attorney general in 1994. And when Mr. Heflin retired, Mr. Sessions won his Senate seat in 1996, the first of three times.

He remains a stalwart conservative and was a chief opponent of a failed overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that would have provided a chance for millions of illegal immigrants to eventually win citizenship.

Mr. Sessions has a reputation in the Senate as a tough but straightforward colleague, and any scars from the confirmation battle appear to have long faded. He says he has an amiable relationship with Mr. Kennedy and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., another member of the panel who was a determined opponent in 1986.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the and Judiciary Committee, says he also finds Mr. Sessions to be a solid colleague.

“I get along very well with Jeff,” said Mr. Leahy, who will now have to work even more closely with Mr. Sessions as they navigate the potentially treacherous confirmation process. “We have traveled together. And he has always kept his word to me.”

But as Mr. Sessions moves into the Supreme Court spotlight, the confirmation battle will be revisited and has already touched off some attacks on the Republican — a development not lost on his colleagues.

“If they go after Jeff,” warned Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, “it is going to backfire.”

Even as Mr. Sessions ascends in the Senate hierarchy, there are those who think he would have preferred a different career path.

“Down deep,” said Senator Richard Shelby, his fellow Alabama Republican, “Jeff would rather have been a federal judge.”